5 Magical Lessons I learned in 2016 that helped me become a better magical experimenter

2016 has been a really interesting year for me, all across the board. I think what I appreciate about this year we just exited it how much I ended up growing because of my willingness to step away from what I knew to embrace the unknown.

Embracing the unknown is a fundamental part of magical practice.

For 2016 I created the theme of respect. At the end of 2015 I called out the Pagan conference organizers on what I considered a lack of transparency around which presenters were compensated for their efforts, and which were expected to pay to present. That choice made me realize that I needed to reevaluate my relationship with respect, and so 2016 became a journey into respect. I learned 5 magical lessons as a result that I'll carry with me through the rest of my spiritual journey.

Lesson 1: Respect begins with you and you must hold to it, if you want others to respect you.

If I wanted respect from other people, I needed to respect myself and I realized that in some ways I really didn't. I made compromises because I wanted to fit in or because I was told it as better to toe the line and not stir up trouble. I disrespected myself and my feelings on certain matters because of that and in 2016 (and the end of 2015) I realized I could no longer disrespect myself, especially because it was clear I wasn't getting the respect that I felt I deserved.

I confronted the Pagan conference organizers and then stepped away from the Pagan conference scene because it was clear that the desired changes and the requested transparency wasn't going to be provided on their part. And in doing that I made the choice to respect myself and my work instead of continuing to toe the line and go along with the status quo.

And you know? It's forced me to become more creative, challenged me to step up my game as an author and presenter, and I love it. I am happier (and more profitable actually) getting away from the Pagan conference scene than continuing to be a cog that is basically used, instead of being a person that's appreciated.

Lesson 2: Create a space for your tribe and they will come.

Part of my journey toward respect involved recognizing that I needed to capitalize on one of my strengths: Creating and sustaining community. Instead of going out into the larger community, I decided to create my own communities around the interests I have and focus on working with those people. My first attempts weren't very effective, but I learned and ultimately came away with two online communities where people are engaged and actively working on what excites them, and where the space is safe, because the focus isn't on tearing people down, but rather on helping them become better at their magical practices.

Creating community showed me that the best way to reach the people I'm called to serve is to provide them a space to gather. I'm already thinking of new ways to continue creating that space and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as a result.

Lesson 3: Sacred time and space for yourself is essential for divine connection and inspiration.

I took the last couple months of 2016 for myself, to really drill down into some work I've been needing to do, both internally and process wise. Stepping away from writing and content creation was good for me because it really helped me get clear on what the purpose of any and all my activities should be for. I still have a lot of work to do, but you'll soon be seeing some of the fruits of my work and I'm really excited about this year will bring.

Lesson 4: What you feel resistant toward learn from.

This year I learned how to work with the temple of memory and the value of correspondence charts and oral chants. I felt some resistance toward working with these concepts, and so I decided to challenge myself to learn about what I was feeling resistant toward. The end result: It's provided me a new approach to how I work with spirits that feels more intimate and connected. I still have a lot of experimentation to do around what I'm learning, but opening myself up to what I felt resistant to lead me to some new magic, some new work that really excites me.

It's important to honor the resistance, but its also good to challenge it and see what you learn as a result.

Lesson 5: Embrace your shame to discover your respect.

This was perhaps the biggest lesson I learned this last year. By choosing to really sit with and embrace the shame I felt, I could respect myself. This internal work was hard and it really put me face to face with some of my demons and made me recognize how I had hurt other people in my life, as well as myself. But out of that work I could make changes and respect myself as a result.

This is why a consistent regime of internal work is so important. When you put the time in to take care of yourself, to really see who you are and how you show up and then make good changes, it frees you from the burdens of guilt and regret that can other wise hold you back and keep you mired in the muck.

What lessons did you learn from 2016 and how you are applying them to your spiritual work and life?

The Role of Lineage in your System of Magic

Note: An advance copy of this article was shared on my Patreon.

As I've been working on my latest book, Pop Culture Magic Systems, one of the frequent topics on my mind is the role of a person's spiritual lineage or history in relationship to creating a system of magic. A system of magic is created as a result of different influences and the spiritual lineage a person has access to is one of those influences. Let me share with you an example, namely my own spiritual lineage.

My spiritual lineage isn't the types of magic I've practiced, but rather specific influences that I consistently integrate into my practice. Those influences can be specific people or specific books or something else. Whatever they are, they continue to exert an influence on my spiritual practice and on the experiments I come up with. When I look at my magical work, the influences, the lineage I see is of specific people: Franz Bardon, Antero Alli, William G. Gray, William S. Burroughs, R. J. Stewart, B. K. Frantzis, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, A.R. Heaver and Edward Schiappa. I haven't met most of these people in person, but they nonetheless have exerted a significant influence on my spiritual practices, and while there have been other sources of inspiration they haven't had the same level of influence of lasting power that these aforementioned people have.

I see the mark of these people in my work, in how I think about magic, how I practice it, and how I experiment with it. They are a lineage of sorts that I draw on. Now your lineage likely won't be the same as mine, but you have one. You have people who are significant to you and your spiritual practice, that influence how you think about and practice magic, and when you recognize that significance, it causes you to look at all of your work in a different way. You don't see it as a singular work, but rather as part of a continuum of work.

Your system of magic is shaped by that continuum. Your lineage is alive and speaks through your system to you, and to anyone else using your approach to magic. When you look at your system, take a moment to recognize who shows up in it. When you see who shows up, what it reveals to you is not just your own ideas and thoughts but also how you have taken the thoughts and idea and practices of others and integrated them into your own work. The importance of that recognition is that it teaches us how to make our lineage live on, and also helps us realize that magic cannot be static. It builds on what came before and changes what came before into what is (in the moment).

When we recognize the role of the past in the work of today, we also sow the seeds of the future.

Genuine magical experimentation doesn't occur in a void. It happens in context to whatever else is significant in your life and work. When you look at who came before you and how they influenced your work and then you see it in your experiments, in your personalized systems of magic, you also discover how to take the past and push it into the future, to evolve the work that's been done into the work that can be discovered and revealed.

My experimentation only started a couple years after I began practicing magic, but those first couple years were important for providing the experiences and foundation I needed to be able to experiment. And so its continued to be the case throughout my own practice. I learn from others and bring what I learn into my experimentation, in order to see how I can take what I've learned to the next level.

What is your lineage? How does that lineage show up in your magical work?

How protection magic is integrated into my daily work

In this video, I share how I integrate protection magic into my daily works, as well as my overall approach to practical magic, which involves stacking magical workings on to activities already being done to achieve the optimal use of one's efforts.

How charging and firing digital media for magical purposes works

Recently I was asked how doing digital magic would work. Do you need to cast a circle before you use an emoji or digital art for magical purposes? I thought I would with a video describing my process for working with online magic, which can be applied to different digital media.

 

The Value of Research

Why research plays an important role in your magical experimentation and why it can be useful to do research in non-occult topics.

Do you enjoy my writing, videos and the Magical Experiments podcast? If so please donate. Your donations go toward the costs of the podcast and this website. Even a dollar helps me maintain and continue the work that you are enjoying. Thanks!

How to get your daily magical practice back on track

A couple weeks back I wrote about what to do when your magical practice is in a slump. Wouldn't you know it? After I wrote that article my magical practice went into a slump, albeit due to the fact that my lovely wife got very sick with Pneumonia. I needed to focus on getting her better, so my daily routine went out the window, and that included my magical practice.

Fortunately I had an energetic reserve to draw on during that week, but once she got better I felt pretty tired, and I needed to rebuild my energetic reserve (watch this video to learn more about that). What I needed to do was get my practice back on track and yet I was feeling decidely unmotivated.

I'm sure you can relate to that.

We all have moments where we get thrown off our daily routines and as a result our practices suffer. And after the problems are resolved, it can be all too easy to let your routine go to the way side. It takes an act of discipline and will to get yourself back on track and focused once again on your practice.

Yet once you do you rediscover all the benefits of doing the daily practice.

• You get more focused and clear on what needs to be done.
• You get more creative and inspired
• You feel grounded and centered
• You connect with the spiritual world and bring it back to the rest of your life.

Those kinds of benefits are powerful, especially when you experience them everyday. They are also cumulative. I know this because when I don't have interruptions to my magical practice, I'm connected to the heart of the universe, and when I don't do my practice, I just don't feel so on or grounded.

So how do you get back on track?

You just decided that you'll start your practice up again and you do it. The first day back is hard, because you're having to reconnect to everything. The next day gets easier, but its an act of discipline and will that moves you back into connection with your spiritual powers and helps you turn the potential of your soul into the manifestation of reality.

You get back on that practice and you do it. It's really as simple as that, and yet as simple as that is, you got to do the work.

P.S. The next round of the process of magic starts June 8th. If you need help developing a consistent practice and sticking with it, this class will be perfect for you.

The identity of family and how to work with it magically

In the most recent episode of Magical Experiments podcast, Maviiin and I were discussing identity and at one point we talked about the identity of family and how it can shape a person positively or negatively. Maviiin made the interesting suggestion that we should be able to change our names at 25, if we want to choose a different one and I like that idea a lot. Yet a recent conversation with a family member got me to thinking about how family identity isn't just constructed by your parents, but also by your ancestors. And why I think that's important is because when we work with our identity, its worth spending some time exploring the environmental factors that play a role.

Family is one of the most significant environmental factors in a person's identity, but for the most part when we think of family, we tend to think of the immediate preceding generations, mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, sisters and brothers (if you have them) and perhaps more distance living relatives. Beyond on a genealogy chart I don't think much thought is given to ancestors further back because those people are dead. They aren't immediate and yet I would argue that their impact on your identity is immediate, in the sense that they had a role in creating the identity of your parents and grandparents and that in turn was passed down to you via your parents and grandparents.

Now you can sometimes learn about your ancestors either via stories told by your parents or grandparents or through their own written accounts (if they left them), and it can give you some sense of who they are, but what is told and shared is filtered to some degree. You can make some guess work about your own patterns of behavior and your family's patterns of behavior to get a sense of how your ancestors might have contributed to those patterns of behavior (A person's behavior doesn't show up in a void after all. A lot can be discovered by looking at how your family handles different emotions for example and comparing it to how you handle your emotions). This isn't to say that you can't be a different person from your family, but I would suggest that even choice to be different is shaped by the identity of your family and the origins of that identity via your ancestors.  

So if we're going to do identity work on ourselves its worth considering how we might also work with our ancestors or at least learn from them? How do we work with them magically (if we choose to) and should we even work with them? I'll admit that I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to work with my ancestors because I'm not sure it would be helpful. What I really want to learn, if anything, is their role in my identity so that I can work with that. And my goal in doing that work really is liberating myself from identity constructs that come from the family or at the very least being aware of them and making whatever changes are most useful as a result.

One thought on how to proceed is to make an offering to my ancestors and ask that if any are willing to communicate to come forward so that I can speak with them. However I've also considered doing a magical working where I access their lives via the genetic information we possess. While there will be some genetic drift, especially as you go further and further back, I would think that as long as I have some genetic similarity to an ancestor I could access their lives through that (kind of like Assassin's Creed). I'll be developing a meditation technique for that process to give it a try and see what happens (and I'll report back here with what I uncover).

I'm curious if any of you, my dear readers, have done any experiments along these lines and what you discovered.

How William S. Burroughs changed my writing and magic

I never met William S. Burroughs in person, but I felt like his reading his books was an introduction to the person. I didn't even encounter Burroughs writing until the spring of 1998, a half year after the author in question had died. It was a senior class seminar for college and I needed the credits and nothing else was remotely appealing.

I remember walking into that class with only a vague idea of who William S. Burroughs was. I knew he was an author and that he'd written a book called Naked Lunch and supposedly done a lot of drugs. I remember not feeling overly enthused at the time, because I was a straight edge kind of person, but I needed the class.

Little did I know that reading William S. Burroughs work would have a significant effect on my magical practice and my writing.

As I started reading his books, I felt his presence, hovering over my shoulder. Burroughs is one of those writers who lives on in his writing, a phantom presence that comes and visits, whispering secrets in your ears as you read his words. You know he's there, but when you look, you can't find him. His soul is embedded in every word. You could say he's a virus in his words.

As I read his books and learned about his writing techniques, I felt like the secrets of the universe were revealed to me. Soon I was cutting up magazines and newspapers and my own writing and randomly gluing it altogether to create my own versions of cut-ups and like Burroughs I discovered that the cut-ups could circumvent linear time and provide glimpses and even manipulations of time.

But Burroughs didn't just write about writing or drugs or all the other subjects he's most known for. He also wrote about magic. Oh his books weren't your average magic books, written explicitly about magic. No, the magic was in his stories, in what the characters did and how Burroughs explained their relationship to the world, spirits, and whatever else he was writing about. In the lurid sex acts, in the depictions of corporate greed, and the frank exploration of the word as a virus, as well as the stories of magic, what Burroughs did was paint a picture of the world that would make so strong an impression on me that it changed me.

I experimented with writing and I experimented with magic. Burroughs wasn't about rules, but about possibilities, and the recognition that there was no such thing as coincidence in a magical universe. What he taught me was that the universe was magical and I had only to open myself to that fact to discover just how magical it could be.

For several years after I finished my undergrad degree, I religiously read Burroughs. There was always at least one book by him among the collection of whatever else I was reading. In reading his books I connected to his spirit and that spirit was my mentor as I experimented with time, and the alchemy of the body.

Burroughs taught me to question control and all its forms, to question the word and why people used the word in the ways they did. And he taught me to question magic and why magic need be so formal, or if it could just be simple and direct. In those days I did a lot of ceremonial magic and its fair to say that Burroughs ruined that for me, because in the way he wrote about magic, he boiled it down and made it simple. The magic of Burroughs was street magic, survival magic, the magic you do to get results, and you don't want to spend lots of time doing things that are unnecessary with that kind of magic.

I connected with Burroughs because I could relate to the struggle of his life as it pertained to dealing with the Ugly Spirit. My Ugly Spirit was my emptiness and I grappled with it constantly then (and for many years afterwards). In reading his writing and reading about his life, I felt a connection to what he'd gone through and while I didn't do anything so dramatic as his William Tell act, I nonetheless knew something of writing for the sake of writing out that ugliness within one's self, because so much of my own writing at the time was precisely about that.

Eventually I got into a Master's program for English and I drifted away from reading Burroughs work, but nonetheless his writing and magic had change me and my approach to everything I did with magic and writing. When the final book of Burroughs came out, Last Words, I remember picking it up and feverishly reading it, the words inscribing themselves into my soul. And his final words, so strong, so poignant speaking to me of a person who found his answers and was ready for the Western Lands.

I haven't read Burroughs in 16 sixteen years. The truth is that you can't read the works of someone like that casually. There's a commitment, a magical connection that demands discipline from you as a reader and as a writer (if you identify as such). But in this year of reconnecting to my writing roots and in some ways my magical roots once again, I have recently started reading his books again. And there his presence is again, ready and waiting after so long, to continue the instruction. I'm ready now to, ready to continue divesting myself of the dead weight of academic writing, which had dulled so much of my writing, to get back to the non-linear narratives that still sing in my soul.

Hurry up please, it's time to go. Nothing here but the recordings, but he's here to, in the recordings. I'm ready to experiment again, ready to see where this journey takes me. I'm ready Burroughs. Thanks for waiting for me.

Why process allows you to experiment with magic

Earlier today (at the time of this writing) I was teaching a class on the process of magic and how the Tree of Life can be used as a model to explore a given magical process. One of the points I made in the class is how important it is to understand how magic works, and that when you have a process mapped out to describe what is happening, it also helps you figure out what isn't working, so that you can make adjustments accordingly. In fact, what a process ultimately provides you is the means to experiment with magic.

Why?

What a process does is describe how your magical working ought to work from beginning to end. It describes your desired result as well as the steps that need to be taken, what principles of magic you'll draw on and what tools, resources and powers that be you'll work with in order to achieve the result. That descriptive map also clues you in on how you can personalize and experiment with your working, so that if you want to do something that isn't traditional, you can still pull it off because the process helps you understand how the magic should work once you've done it.

I like to think of it as elegant magic because what it really does is helps you simplify the magical work and make it your own. And really that's how magic ought to be...simple, focused, and helping you achieve the result you want. I think that what usually makes it so complex for people has more to do with not having a process in place...or what I call push button magic, where so much is invested in doing magic a particular way because that's the way magic is being taught or that's the way its written about, or because the spell says it needs these components.

The problem with push button magic is that it doesn't encourage critical thinking or awareness or experimentation. It simply takes a prescriptive approach to magic and says this is the way you do it, often with little to no explanation for WHY you do it that way. Yet such an approach dulls the magic, because it doesn't set people up to discover what really works for them and will help them achieve the desired results they want.

A process approach to magic, on the other hand, is a descriptive approach that encourages experimentation with magic precisely because it encourages critical awareness and thinking about what you are doing and why you are doing it. It also encourages you to look at each step and ask yourself what you can do to make it work better.

Personally I like that approach to magic because it encourages innovation and experimentation and personalization of your magical work. You figure out what really works for you, why it works, and then you implement it. And if there is a problem, you go into your process and figure out what the problem is and then make the changes. No guess work involved, just a process that can be taken apart and put back together in a way that actually encourages the person to understand what is happening, in order to make it successful.

I've always found that experimenting with magic makes what I do with it work very effectively, because I understand what's happening. I understand what each step does and how it feeds into the working. I understand how the result will manifest and I know what to look for if something goes wrong.

After my class, I spoke with a person who found me and my website because of my writings about magic and sound. She told me that my process approach to magic gave her permission to experiment with the folk magic she was doing and use it in ways that it hadn't been used before. It allowed her to create new products that she couldn't find anywhere else, because she now had a process that she could use to describe what she was doing and implement that process with confidence. I thought that was cool, not the least because I don't really do anything with folk magic, but here was this person who does, who could take a process approach to it and achieve real results.

A process approach to magic can be applied to any type of magical practice. What it sets up for that magical practice is a method for exploring what is really happening in that practice, and then making modifications accordingly. It's the basis of experimentation. Map out what you have, then start experimenting with what you can change. It's beautiful and elegant.

Living the Myth

In Magical Imagination by Nick Farrell shares a cautionary story of a magical group that made the Arthurian mythos a part of their identity and consequently ended up re-enacting that myth in their lives. The point that Nick makes is that too close of an identification with a mythos can cause you to manifest the themes and characters in your life in ways that aren't desirable. In the case of that magical group, the head of the group lost his wife when she ran off another person in the group (a Lancelot to the head's Arthur) and then had issues with other people who ended up replicating other aspects of the mythos. It's a good cautionary story that highlights the reality that when you work closely with a given mythology and identify with the entities in that mythology, it can take on a life of its own and effect your life both positively and negatively.

Pop culture mythology is no different than classical mythology, other than the fact that its contemporary mythology. If you look at a given mythology it has themes and values written into the story and it has characters that perform essential roles in moving the story along and relating the narrative to people. Most importantly the mythology establishes a shared sense of identity with the fan. That identity is what causes the fan to like the pop culture mythology and to either replicate it or create new myths within the mythology. This is why fan fiction of various types is written, because it allows the people writing it (and reading it) to contribute to the pop culture mythology and also interact with the characters they love.

If you want to magically work with the mythology of your favorite pop culture, it's worth while to do so carefully. You may find that you identify strongly with certain characters, but you don't want to identify so strongly that you take on their flaws. I once did some work with several characters from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms mythology and part of that work was influenced by how they were depicted in the Dynasty Warrior video game series. I identified strongly with the character Lu Bu, but ended up taking on some of his less desirable traits such as his anger and short-sightedness. Once I realized this I stopped working with him and those issues just as quickly ceased showing up in my behavior. What I've done since then is build in filters so that if I'm working with a given character closely, I'm only taking on the attributes that are helpful to me and the work I'm doing.

When you work with the pop culture mythology at large, you need to not only pay attention to the characters, but also the themes of the mythology itself so that you can be aware of how those themes are showing up in your life. That awareness can help you to build in appropriate filters while also drawing on the themes in a way that is helpful to the work you are doing. I also think it can be worthwhile to actually do some banishing if you find that the theme of a given pop culture mythology is replicating itself in your life too much. At the same time, its important to recognize that if the pop culture mythology is a central part of your practice, then part of accepting that mythology involves recognizing that the themes may need to occur in your life because of how you are making them central to your identity. However that doesn't mean you have to let those themes into your life in an unhealthy way, which is why it is so important to filter and focus on what relationship you really want to have with the mythology you are working with.

There is one other point to make and it is that when you choose to work closely with a mythology, pop culture or otherwise, you are inviting change into your life and you won't have complete control of that change. What you do have control over is how you respond to it and so it is very important to pay close attention to your behavior and interactions with other people. If you find that certain thematic elements are coming into your life, ask yourself how you will handle those elements and make sure that you are aware of how they show up in the lives of the people around you. That way you can be prepared for them and make sure that the themes show up in a way that is helpful to your life journey and spiritual practice.

Do you like my writing? If so become my patron on Patreon. Your support helps me continue my writing and experimentation.

Magical Experiments Radio: Interview with Crystal Blanton about Racism and Cultural Appropriation in the Pagan Community.

How magical workings evolve

Recently I was talking with a student who was telling me about how the job entity she'd created in the Process of Magic class, as well as several other workings had seemed to evolve and change to fit her own changing circumstances. I wasn't surprised, because in my experience a magical working never really ends, so much as it changes. I've noticed that some people buy into the notion that there is an end to a magical working, as if the manifestation of the result just finishes it up, and yet what is not recognized is that the manifestation of a result does't just manifest the result, but also the subsequent changes that occur because the result is turned into reality. The magic doesn't end with the result, but carries forth into those changes.

Now it could be argued that a magic working should have a defined beginning and end, and certainly the actual working may have that defined beginning and ending, but when you are doing magic, the working ultimately isn't just limited to those moments who you are engaged in it. The working extends beyond the formal beginning and ending, shaped by the circumstances that called for the working and shaping reality in response to those circumstances. You can do a working and in the initial moment not recognize the changes, only to realize later just how much your life has changed as a result of doing the working.

A magical working isn't something to be done lightly. It may help you solve a problem in the moment, but also set your life up in ways you didn't expect. In some ways I think of a magical working as a living being in and of itself. It changes as your life changes and in some ways prompts the change in your life, which is why the saying Be careful what you ask for, because you will get it, is an apt one. There's a reason that the words you use in a magical working are chosen carefully, because you aren't just setting up the immediate realization of the magical working, but also the permutations of that working.

Yet you can't let that stop you from doing magical work. And if you're seriously engaged in doing the work you'll find that what allows you to make the evolution of the magic work best in your favor is the implementation of daily internal work that allows you to work through your issues and helps you recognize what you really want.

Do you like my writing? Become my patron. Your support helps me continue my creative projects.

Magical Experiments: Interview with Gordana Kokic about Slavic Polytheism

The illusion of Will

I've always been fascinated with will power and the depictions of will power that a person can find in pop culture. The hero for example, who prevails against the odds because of his/her will power carrying them through the hardships and temptations that come their way. Will power also shows up in magic, to some extent, in the sense of the magician imposing his/her will on reality. To some degree Will can be treated as destiny or fate, when describing someone doing their true will. In that sense it's almost a compulsion of sorts and may not really have anything to do with will power. The problem I have with will power is that to a large extent it seems to be illusory. It's a trope of the rugged individual, a person who is always in control or uses will power to get control of a situation and yet based on my studies of behavior and environment I find what makes will power effective has less to do with the person and more to do with the person's environment.

The environment you are in, and what you have in that environment plays a role in will power and how successfully you are able to use it. For example, lets say you are on a diet. If you have food near you that you would want to eat, it becomes harder to resist eating that food, especially if you are engaged in other activities that take up your attention. To a large extent what makes will power work has more to do with how you design your environment proactively to support your success in whatever you are trying to change. If your environment isn't set up for optimal success, then it becomes harder to make those changes and while will power can help, it can only do so much.

Magic, to some extent, is about controlling the environment, and so I think that if a person wants to make a change, part of designing the environment should involve doing some magical work to that effect. For example, you might set up specific energetic spaces or zones which encourage the specific change in behavior you want or ping your consciousness when you are about to do something that doesn't support the change in behavior you seek. The more you work with the environment you are in to design it to support your desired change, the easier it is for your will power to execute that change. I'll be writing about this in more depth as time goes on, because I've become increasingly convinced that genuine change is developed when you have the right tools and environment in place to support the change. All the will power in the world won't do you any good unless you have the environment set up to support the execution of will power toward change.

Note: I chose the picture of Dr. Doom to represent will power, because that's the first image that comes to mind when I think of will power.

Magical Experiments podcast: Interview with Lydia Crabtree about Family Covens and Hereditary Witchcraft.

The Balance of Power

For my fun reading, I've been reading some Star Wars Fiction lately. The other day I was reading Visions of the Future by Timothy Zahn, and in it the characters Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade have a conversation about power versus guidance as it applies to the Force. Luke has been cutting back on how much he uses the Force, trying to rely on himself more and Mara points out that the resultant clarity he's gotten has occurred precisely because he's balanced the application of power. The Sith always use the power of the Force to excess, which is why it burns them out. Reading this got me to thinking about my magical practice and how its changed as a result of a similar realization I had years ago.

When I first started practicing magic, I used it for pretty much every problem I encountered. In fact I did that for about a good decade or so into my practice. A problem would come up, and inevitably I'd utilize magic to "solve" the problem. I enjoyed doing it, enjoyed seeing what I could do with it. But then something changed. I'd always integrated meditation into my practice, but I began doing a lot more internal work and I saw how much my practice was really reactive. A problem would occur and I would react to it. And what I didn't see was how many of those problems were similar to each other, nor did I acknowledge the one constant in those problems: Myself. Doing internal work helped me take a step back and ask myself what I really wanted from my magical practice and from myself.

Over the last decade and change, I've taken a different approach to my magical work. While I still occasionally utilize magic to solve problems, overall my focus has really been on doing the necessary internal work I need to do and as a result the need to do magic to solve problems has exponentially gone down. The majority of magical workings are proactive, focused on achieving specific designs or experimenting for the sake of learning something new. The power is there, but it is focused in a different way. And if anything I've found that by doing internal work and ironing out my issues, I've actually empowered myself in a much deeper way. I'm coming into my own as a person and my actions are guided by an awareness of who I want to be, instead of just reacting to my issues and whatever external variables have come together.

There is something to be said for approaching situations and seeing what you can do to resolve them without magic, or better yet to take a proactive approach with your magical work and create by design what you truly want. But I don't think you can really know what you want until you've stepped back and examined your choices and behaviors and discovered the patterns that speak to the tensions within you that need to be resolved. That's kind of self-discovery takes time. I only really started in my mid twenties and now in my late thirties I can still safely say that I have a ways to go, though I do feel more clarity in my choices and decisions than I previously had.

A measured approach to magical work, as it applies to practical changes, is wise to take. Ask yourself if you really need magic to resolve a situation or if there are other ways to handle it. And ask yourself what you really want out of the situation. Knowing what you want will help you pick the best process, magical or otherwise. It also help you knowingly accept any consequences and proactively plan your life to to help you achieve what you want. If you need to employ magic, you'll do it in a manner that fully respects the power of what you are working with, but also your power as a person.

Magical Experiments podcast: Interview with Laurie Pneumatikos about the Left Hand Path and the upcoming Left Hand Path Consortium in April 2016!

The Tenets of the Sorcerer Scientist

Lately I've been thinking about my approach to magical work and experimentation. I commented to Kat the other day that I am not someone who is focused on one tradition or spiritual path and I don't think I ever will be. I think of myself as a sorcerer scientist (fittingly enough the term comes from pop culture, specifically fantasy books). While I certainly have a background in magical practices, traditions, etc., I'm at the same time fascinated with contemporary disciplines and how those disciplines can be meshed with magical principles. This prompts a lot of my experimentation. So I've decided to come up with tenets that describe the sorcerer scientist, because I feel that in describing it, not only can I help myself better understand my own spiritual path, but also speak to those people who feel similar and don't feel they fit into conventional occultism. To do this, it's useful to define a couple of terms.

Magic: Magic is a methodology of manifesting a specific possibility into reality using specific techniques that help the person connect the possibility to reality. Magic is also a means for communing with the universe as well as entities that exist on other planes of existence, in order to either better understand the universe or in order to get help with turning a possibility into reality. There are a variety of magical traditions and practices that can be learned and experimented with.

Science: Science is a variety of contemporary disciplinary practices that provide specific perspectives for understanding the universe. For example, hard sciences such as biology or Physics provide perspectives and critical inquiry into the nature of life or the "rules" for how the universe works. Soft sciences such as culture studies or psychology provide insight into behavioral patterns and cognitive activities. There are a wide variety of disciplines that could fall under this term of science, including what people might traditionally consider art. For all intents and purposes, the sorcerer scientist recognizes that the categorization of science is used as a way of recognizing the integration of contemporary disciplines into magical work, as opposed to defining what disciplines could be considered science or art or whatever else.

The sorcerer scientist is interested in the techniques of magic and the disciplinary practices of the various sciences and how those techniques and practices can be melded together to enhance the ongoing work of the sorcerer scientist. The sorcerer scientist isn't interested in using science to explain what magic is, but rather s/he is interested in exploring what magic could be. The tenets of the sorcerer scientist are as follows:

1. Cultivate an active interest in various disciplines, both occult and otherwise in order to see how they can be merged together. The experimenter recognizes that having a broad foundation informs and inspires the magical experimentation s/he does.

2. Keep an open mind about what you learn, but also use critical inquiry to refine your work. Ask questions and examine conclusions carefully.

3. Experimentation is essential for the evolution of magic. Respect tradition and learn from it. Research in order to ground yourself in what others have done. Experiment to find out what you can do and get your own answers about yourself, life, the universe, etc.

4. Be your own authority. Create your own definitions. Work with others, but recognize that what they ultimately can offer is just their perspectives and experiences. You still have to come up with your own answers, and your own questions.

The Value of Research in your Spiritual Work

Research is a significant part of my writing, but also of the spiritual work I do. Recently, I finished reading The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Jung (review below). One of the reasons I read his works is because I wanted to understand his perspective on the concepts of archetypes and individuation, but also because I'd seen him referenced by other writers and I wanted to know if their take on is work was accurate. By researching the source I came away with a better understanding of the terms archetype and individuation. In general, I do a lot of research when writing my books and all of that research is driven toward getting a comprehensive understanding of other people's takes on a given subject so that I can see how it informs my own understanding as well as the spiritual work I do.

When it comes to spiritual work, research is important because you can discover a lot that informs your perspective on your spiritual practice. Just settling for what one source has to share can really limit your perspective, whereas uncovering multiple resources can help you critically engage with the practice you are involved in. To uncover those sources, you might ask for recommendations or look at the bibliography of the books you've already read.

Its also useful to find resources outside of the discipline you study in. While those resources may not contribute directly to the discipline, they may provide you alternative perspectives that you can bring to your spiritual work. For instance, reading books on physics and psychology has informed a lot of my spiritual work because the perspectives I've gathered from those works have helped me look at what I'm doing in a different way, as have other perspectives from other sources.

Good research involves not just reading, but actively working with you've learned. In my case, its involved coming up with experiments where I've applied and test what I've learned, as well as modified it. That work has also been part of the research I've done. It allows me to verify what I've read and truly learn it because I've applied it to my life, instead of just reading about it. Good research is a combination of reading and studying and experimentation. Your experimentation may point you in the direction of further research. For instance, in my work with inner alchemy, I've been reading a variety of sources and that has been partially inspired by the ongoing experimentation and the realization that I need to explore additional sources of information to determine what directions to take that experimentation.

How do you integrate research into your spiritual work?

Podcast Interview: Mike Sententia of Magick of Thought shares his unique perspectives and experiments with magical work.

Book Review: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Jung

This is a collection of essays by Jung about his work with archetypes and individuation. I highly recommend it if you want to understand the psychological concepts and the context in which those concepts are framed. There's some interesting perspectives that Jung shares on these terms that can help readers understand what they mean and how they apply to states of awareness the person experiences. I also found the case studies and art useful for further demonstrating what the author was sharing in terms of what his patients experienced. If you want to understand archetypes and individuation read this work.

Why Tradition should never be Static

Sometimes when I've talked with fellow Pagans and Occultists about the word Tradition, what I'm struck by is a sense that the goal of being part of a spiritual tradition is to somehow keep the tradition from ever changing. The practitioners involved want to keep the tradition static, to make it be the same as it was when they first learned it or when it was first created. I've always found this a bit worrying because when something becomes static it doesn't adapt and eventually it does out. Sometimes, why a given spiritual tradition stays viable is because that tradition changed or adapted to the times. The other day I was reading The Talking Tree by William G. Gray and he made the following observation about Tradition:

Tradition should be a living spirit, persisting among people from one generation to another and consequently leading them constantly from past learning to future illumination. This means that Tradition ought to be in a continual state of evolution and improvement. It is essentially the spiritual growth of human souls both individually and collectively. It stands for regenerative replacement and never for degenerative decay.

What I get from this statement is that tradition is never meant to be static. Tradition is meant to evolve and change and adapt to the times and people that are involved in it. This isn't to say that the past shouldn't be honored or acknowledged or explored...far from it! The past always informs the development of the future. We stand on the shoulders of those who come before us. A spiritual tradition should never divorce itself from its past and yet it should also embrace the future and experimentation that is relevant to the tradition. By doing so, the tradition doesn't become static but instead is sustained by the active inquiry and work that its practitioners perform. More importantly those practitioners do that work from a place of active engagement, instead of rote performance for the sake of doing it the way its always been done.

Tradition renews us spiritually, but we renew it spiritually as well. A tradition is not defined by the person who created it or the people chosen by that person to continue it. The tradition is defined by every practitioner of it and as such each practitioner's journey with the tradition is sacred and meaningful. There may be certain people who become spokespeople for a tradition, but those people should never presume that their word is final or discourage the spiritual journey of another practitioner in the tradition. With that said, part of what makes a tradition viable is that people do examine the work that's occurring and ask if it really does fit the tradition or really is an evolution of it. If magical work occurs that moves away from the core values and principles of a tradition, that work may not fit that tradition (although it could become its own tradition). As such its important to have some idea of what constitutes change in a tradition that still makes the change part of tradition.

For example, if you're working with specific deities in a tradition, its one thing if how you work with them evolves. That could be considered part of the tradition. It's altogether different if you start arbitrarily adding in other deities or getting rid of specific deities. In such a case, the question: "Is this part of our tradition?" is a valid question to ask, because you may be changing the tradition itself. Likewise if you experimenting with a technique that is part of the tradition that can be an evolution of that technique. If, on the other hand, you randomly introduce a technique from another belief system, it may need to be examined carefully, especially if contextually it doesn't make sense. Yet it should be noted a technique could be introduced and become contextually relevant if it is applied within the parameters of a tradition.

As Gray notes traditions should be a living spirit. To make a tradition a living spirit, the evolution of it should be welcomed and embraced as an opportunity for the people involved to grow in their spirituality and in the work they do. If change can be embraced and at the same time applied with a standard that is relevant to the core values of the tradition, then the tradition will stay relevant.

Magical Experiments podcast: In this episode I interviewed Ivo Dominguez Jr about his work, the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, and the Neo-Alexandrian Library.

Connection part 2

Part 2 of the principle of connection explores how connection works in further detail

The role of connection in magical work

The role of connection in magical work

The Advanced Pop Culture Magic Teleclass is happening next week!

Pop culture magic isn't just for geeks. It's magic anyone can practice, based on foundation principles of magic, and on the modern culture that is available to all of us. In this class, you'll learn how to apply pop culture to magical practices, as well as how to troubleshoot your pop culture magical workings so you get consistent results. You will also learn:

• What pop culture is and how to apply it to your magical process.
• How to contact and work with pop culture entities and deities.
• How social media can be applied to magical work.
• How video games and online games can be used to create magical rituals with virtual covens.
• What board games, comic books, and other pop culture can teach you about magic.
• and much, much more.

Pop culture magic isn't a fad or a reinvention of the wheel. It is a viable magical system, with room for lots of personalization based on the pop culture of your choice. By learning how to apply pop culture to your magical practice, you'll discover how you can take the pop culture you love and turn it into a viable magical working that produces results and changes your life.

When you take this class you'll achieve the following benefits:

• Workshop your pop culture magic workings with me, to discover how you can improve on them.
• Discover how to turn your favorite pop culture into a viable system of magic.
• Know you aren't alone in practicing pop culture magic and get connected to other people.
• Learn advanced pop culture magic techniques.

Who should attend this class?

This class is for Pagans and Magicians who want to integrate pop culture into their magical work, or already are and want to improve on their workings. If you're an armchair magician or don't like pop culture, this class isn't for you.

When does this class meet?

This is a teleclass that meets Wednesday June 24th from 7pm Pacific Standard time to 8:30pm Pacific Standard Time. When you RSVP, I'll send you the call-in information.

About the Teacher

Hi, I’m Taylor Ellwood, occult author, magical experiment, and Esoteric books publisher. I love to share my expertise, knowledge, and process with you! I’ve been teaching classes on magic since the late 1990's. What I love about magic is the endless possibilities for experimentation and process development.

Learn more about Taylor

When you take this teleclass, you'll also get the following Bonuses:

• A recording of the teleclass
• A Free E-book with Pop Culture Magic articles by me.
• A private online forum to share what you are working on with pop culture magic.

What's the Investment?

The investment for this class is $49. To sign up click on the paypal button below. Once you've signed up I'll send you the relevant call-in information.

How to recognize when to challenge your own beliefs

On the Magick of Thought Blog, Mike recently shared a post about the Danger of Popular Memes and Ancient Wisdom and how the blind acceptance of ideas and practices can cause the practitioner to avoid ask questions and critically examining what they are doing in order to improve it. In my own approach to magic, one of my rules is that the magician should be willing to consistently challenge his/her own beliefs about how magic works, or for that matter how anything else works. I've applied this rule to my own work and it's always helped me to stay sharp and never accept any explanation as a given. Test what you are told or what you tell yourself and keep testing it to see what you can change and/or improve upon.

To recognize when you need to challenge your own beliefs, its important to consider that what you think you know can actually hold you back from discovery. What you know becomes a prison in a sense because it keeps you from asking questions. You know it, and yet that knowing is an illusion that necessarily must be challenged, in order to open yourself to possibilities. When we treat what we know as a given, we limit ourselves and close off possible perspectives. Limitation in that way isn't useful, because it keeps us from exploring and utilizing those perceptions.

The best time to recognize when you need to challenge your beliefs is when you start to become so sure of them that you take them for granted. Once something is taken for granted it becomes part of the background, and when this occurs with what you belief it means you are no longer challenging what you believe. Instead you've accepted it and the limitations that come with it. The key is to continually challenge yourself on what you believe and ask yourself if it really applies to the situation, or if there are possibilities that could be explored. By doing so you may discover solutions you would otherwise ignore.

Magical Experiments podcast

This week's Magical Experiments podcast is with Felix Warren and discusses his work with the Goetia and how that work was inspired by the anime series Slayer. Click here to listen.